Major news outlets are suddenly reporting today that Special Counsel Robert Mueller could be turning in his final report about Donald Trump as soon as next week. This is great news, if Mueller and new Attorney General William Barr are on the same page, and Mueller is doing this because he’s ready to take Trump down. But what if this is something else entirely?

Let’s hypothetically say that Robert Mueller is not done with his investigation, and William Barr is corruptly demanding that Mueller turn in an incomplete report anyway, so Barr can edit it and then announce that Donald Trump has been exonerated. In such case we’re all screwed, right? Well, only if Mueller is a complete idiot, which we know he certainly is not.

Robert Mueller took down the smart criminals behind the Enron scam. He took down cleverly corrupt mob boss John Gotti. These were people who were supposed to be impossible to crack, yet Mueller cracked them. He’s no naive fool. He’s known from the start that, once he finally got to the finish line, Donald Trump would try some kind of scheme to prevent him from actually crossing the finish line.

Donald Trump isn’t particularly imaginative. He’s a brute force con artist. We’ve known all along that Trump’s endgame would likely consist of trying to find a way to bury Robert Mueller’s findings in a DOJ drawer. Trump is obviously counting on William Barr doing just that. But Trump usually guesses wrong when he counts on people to do his corrupt political bidding. Trump thought James Comey and Rod Rosenstein would protect him, but they were too smart to go to prison for him. And Trump’s eager henchmen like Devin Nunes, Matt Whitaker and Rudy Giuliani have turned out to be too inept to help him.

The bottom line is that Robert Mueller, rather obviously, has an insurance policy of some kind. Maybe Mueller’s old friend Barr is Mueller’s insurance policy. Maybe it’s a stack of sealed indictments sitting in an SDNY vault. We don’t know what Mueller has up his sleeve, but that’s the point; as long as we don’t know, Donald Trump doesn’t know either.